Conveniently His Omnibus

She heard him swear, and then say curtly. ‘Yes, she is, but Sophy—’

She cut him off before he could say any more, telling him quietly, ‘Then I don’t think we have anything to say to one another really, do you, Jon?’

This time, after she had replaced the receiver, the telephone did not ring again and she did not really expect it to.

Upstairs alone in bed, she tried to clear her mind so that she could force it to accept a truth it did not want to know. It hurt that Jon had not even told her himself about Lillian. She had known something was wrong but she had had no idea what that something was.

She laughed then, a high hysterical sound that shocked her own ears until she controlled it. How ironic that Jon should meet and fall in love with Lillian such a very short time after marrying her.

How doubly ironic when she remembered what Mary-Beth had said about Jon postponing the trip so that they could be married first. How he must have regretted not waiting. She turned uneasily in her bed wondering how long it would take their divorce to go through. She wasn’t very well up in the legalities of these things. And then her mind drifted to David and Alex. Both of them adored Jon. How could she tell them what was happening in such a way that neither of them would ever know that their uncle had rejected them?

It was all so out of character somehow and yet wasn’t she just telling herself that because she didn’t want to believe the truth? She had to hand it to Lillian, coming to see her like that. In her place she doubted that she would have had the courage to do so. And yet Sophy knew that Lillian had enjoyed telling her, hurting her. The thought of Jon deliberately lying to her, so that he could be with Lillian, was so galling and painful that she could scarcely endure it. And then to come back and make love to her...to substitute her for Lillian, because that was surely what he had done.

He said he wanted you, an inner voice taunted her...perhaps he had, Sophy acknowledged. Man was a strange animal and could desire what he did not love...or perhaps that had simply been his way of trying to fight free of his love for Lillian. Perhaps he had felt honour bound to at least try to make a success of their marriage and maybe he had hoped that in making love to her he could forget the other woman. Obviously he had not done so.

By the time morning came, she was totally exhausted and had to drag herself downstairs to get the children’s breakfast.

Both of them commented on her pale face.

‘I haven’t been feeling very well,’ she fibbed to them and saw David’s eyes widen as he asked her curiously, ‘Does that mean you and Uncle Jon are going to have a baby? Ladies sometimes aren’t very well when they do.’

A baby? She managed a tight smile and shook her head negatively. But what if she was wrong? What if she was carrying Jon’s child? It was, after all, perfectly possible.

She would just have to worry about that eventually if it actually happened, she told herself grimly.

Because it was a Saturday there was no need for her to take the children to school, but both of them had made arrangements to see friends and by the time Sophy got back from ferrying them to their individual destinations it was gone eleven o’clock.

As she turned into the drive she realised that the day had become very overcast, the threat of thunder hanging sullenly on the too still air.

It was time the weather broke; they needed a storm to clear the air and rain for the over-parched garden. A tension headache gripped her forehead in a vice as she walked inside. She had always been petrified of storms. Not so much the thunder but the lightning—a childhood hang-up from a story someone had once told her about someone being struck by lightning and ‘frizzled to death’. Knowing now that her fear was illogical still did not remove it and she shivered slightly as she made herself a cup of coffee, dreading the storm to come.

The house had never seemed more empty. She had loved it when she first came here as Jon’s assistant, and what happy plans she had made for it when she had agreed to marry him. She had pictured it as a proper home... Now she was alone with the reality that said a house no matter how pleasant was merely a shell. It was people who made that shell a home.

By one o’clock the sky was a sullen grey; and it was dark enough for her to need to switch the kitchen light on. The sudden ring on the front doorbell jarred her too sensitive nerves.